Vue 5 Infinite review

By
Simon Danaher
| on May 12, 2005

Pros: EcoSystem for creating and rendering foliage and other scenery containing billions of polygons. Multipass rendering and unlimited network rendering as standard. Poser-scene integration, including animation.

Cons: Some of the high-quality antialiasing settings can be slow, and Smartgraph is a little unstable. The candy interface is not to everyone’s taste.

Expert Rating:We rate this 8 out of 10

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E-on software’s Vue range of 3D landscape rendering software (formally known as Vue d’Esprit) has become the de facto standard for mid-range work, but has always stopped short of offering high-end features for professionals. Vue 5 Infinite tackles this issue face-on with some impressive new features aimed at those wanting bigger, better landscape scenes at higher quality and with greater flexibility.

The most attention-grabbing addition is the new EcoSystems. E-on has sorted the significant problem of populating landscapes with flora. You used to have to do this by hand, but now the program can plant trees over a mountain range
or grass on a field – even buildings in a city – automatically. Such scenes might contain billions of polygons, but new optimizations allow Vue to handle such huge data sets on any desktop computer. This is what pros have been desperate for. It produces much better images, and saves a lot of time.

Secondly, Vue 5 Infinite offers multipass rendering – essential for tweaking renders for utmost quality without having to re-render. There’s also improved illumination methods that include GI or full Radiosity and illumination baking to allow optimization of the indirect lighting solution for animation or real-time use. HDRI is supported too. Quality is further enhanced through post-render effects such as colour-correction, and gamma adjustment. Vue 5 Infinite now uses a 96-bit internal colour space.